Cybersecurity is the number one concern for CIOs in state security for 2015 – and no wonder. State security systems house an enormous amount of data on any number of people, organizations, and even infrastructures – but keeping your organization’s data safe is just as important.

Nothing shakes the worlds of those in charge of businesses, engineering teams or information technology more than an attack on their intellectual property (IP): the source code, product designs, formulae, process engineering documents and related assets that are a company's most valuable IP.

#CIOchat explores this explosive issue Thursday, 2-3 p.m. ET.

President Obama made an impassioned plea at the Feb. 13 Cyber Security Summit for the private sector and the federal government to exchange cyber threat information. The idea is simple: teaming up is better than separately waging the war against cyber terrorism, spying and crime.

Unlike computer worms and viruses that usually attack indiscriminately, targeted cyberattacks involve intelligent planning with respect to the chosen target or class of targets. Also evident in these attacks, is a difference in attitude: the threat agent wants to attack the victim and is willing to expend the extra effort to target them as an individual (or group).

They do it for blizzards and the Super Bowl.

How do you assess technology risk? When do you assess it? There's plenty of methodologies that do this and I've linked to a several documents below, one a risk assessment toolkit authored by the State of California CIO Michele Robinson and another NIST guidelines for assessing technology risk.

Stars align for passage of key cyber security legislation.

CIO has a spot-on commentary describing how cyber criminals are closely watching how the U.S. will respond to the Sony hack. Indeed, I wrote a couple of days ago about the President and Congress promising to come together on cyber security legislation that, among other things, aims to forge a stronger relationship between government and the private sector for exchanging threat information.